Cracked Nuts from the Squirrel's Hoard
by ChibiRisu-chan
Summary: Collection of Naruto oneshots. Some serious, most seriously cracked out. Approach with caution. KakaIru, Gai being Excessively Gai, Itachi as Evil Goth Queen of All He Surveys, and more.
1. Memories

_Here's where I'm putting a collection of miscellaneous Naruto shorts I've written for various LJ communities. I'm posting them in the order I wrote them, because there's really no common thread tying them together aside from the fact that they're all Naruto-based and most of them are KakaIru-centric.  
_

_--ChibiRisu-chan_

**_

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_**

**_KakaIru Themes: #3 - Memories_**  
October 2004

So I thought somebody ought to start the ball rolling on the KakaIru themes that got posted on LJ, and one of them kinda overlapped with my sewing spree. I was trying to deal with a full bolt of muslin today, and flashing back on life as an undergrad in the theater department combined with life with the Viking reenactors who were in Braveheart, and it occurred to me that if I wanted to be strictly authentic with the chuunin costumes I've made, then I shouldn't hem the leg wrappings, and also why I shouldn't hem them. But since these are costumes they're nice and hemmed and frayproof! But I had to write this down and get it out of my head and be able to say I'd actually gotten started on the themes thing...

* * *

Theme 3: Memories 

When he was a child, Iruka had never understood why his mother had always looked away when he offered to help with certain chores. She'd been more than patient with his attempts at 'helping' her cook, and always managed to eat some of it even if it turned out charred or hard as a brick. He didn't much like cleaning, but sometimes he offered to help anyway, particularly if the weather was bad and the alternative was (shudder) _reading_ something; she'd smiled and rumpled his hair and always gave him a dustcloth, and he remembered being ecstatic the first time he was judged old enough and tall enough to manage the broomstick by himself, and then the rake for the falling leaves that same autumn.

Leaves were trickier than dust bunnies; they scattered and danced away, and the trees kept making _more_ of them, which Iruka considered unforgivably rude behavior in the face of his best efforts. But when he was worn out and the yard was as clean as it could get despite the trees' vengeful spitting of occasional stragglers onto the exhaustively-raked yard, his mother met him at the door with two mugs of hot cider in her hands, and they sat on the porch and watched the sun slip away for the evening, and Iruka had felt terribly grown up for an eight-year-old.

Laundry, though... for some reason, laundry was a touchy subject with his mother. He liked splashing in the bubbles, even though he was far too short to reach the laundry-lines for drying, so his mother left a few shirts for him to 'help' with as she hung the rest of the laundry to dry. And she was patient with his attempts at sewing on buttons, and kissed his finger when he poked himself and cried, and didn't even scold him _too_ much whenever he came home head to toe mud after an afternoon of playing ninja with his academy-mates. But sometimes her eyes would go strange and tight as she washed and hung the laundry, and Iruka never quite found the courage to ask why.

Iruka learned to dread the bandages-day by himself, even before he had his own reasons to hate the task, because one particular day each fall, his mother's face was always pale and grim and tired, the day when she came home from the market with a bolt of fabric, white like a shroud. Iruka didn't know why she hated bandages-day so much; he offered to help, and she shook her head and chased him into the yard to play, or to rake leaves, or to do anything but stand there watching her. So Iruka went and climbed a tree, and masked himself as well as he could with a young genin's barely-learned skills, and watched anyway as she tore and folded the bandages.

By the time he was a teenager, he understood why his mother had hated bandages-day.

His own nightmare had begun on Naruto's birthday. Dragged shouting from the field his parents would never return from, some harried medic had set the boy to making bandages to keep his hands busy with something useful while the old men and women who could no longer fight tended to the wounded who were lucky enough -- or unlucky enough -- to survive.

The muslin came in stacks like cordwood, twenty-five yards to a bolt. Iruka's world had tightened into a white-draped cycle of eights and threes: eight sections, three yards apiece, the leftover yard tossed aside to be used for padding or mopping up blood or worse. Each piece was to be torn in half, then in half again, then in half again, leaving eight long strips, the ends dripping long white threads like spider-silk, tangling in everything. Then the pile was thrown into a tub of bleach, not for whitening but for sterilizing, and someone older would take the tub away when it was full, and return an empty tub for filling.

For the rest of his life, the smell of bleach, smoke, and blood intermingled was enough to make his mind shut down for a moment, and his body shake as he tried to fight back the sick flood of terror left from that night's desperate silent wager with an uncaring universe: _if I can finish three more bolts before midnight, then my parents will come back... two more bolts... one more... --if I can finish three more before one... before two.._.

He didn't remember three a.m., but no matter how many bandages he tore, there weren't enough bandages in the world to bring his parents back to him, or to bandage the wounds in his own heart.

By the time he understood what he saw in his mother's eyes, she wasn't there for him to tell her, _I'm grown up now, Mother. Now I understand, and that's what makes me grown up, in this village_.

But he wished, sometimes, that he could have asked her what it was that she'd seen, just so that he'd know. Just so that she could have died knowing someone would live on who knew what it was her eyes had remembered.

That was what made the leg-wrappings the most difficult lesson to teach, every year at the Academy. Not the complex things, not the blending of hand seals and chakra for a tricky-to-balance jutsu, not even teaching children how to sharpen blades and throw kunai... no, the one that always hurt was the lesson on leg-wrappings.

_Three pieces of muslin, three yards apiece, one wrapped around one thigh -- on the side of your dominant hand -- and both calves. So that you can hide shuriken in the folds of the thigh-wrapping, and so that you always have emergency bandages available. Yes, I know the threads go everywhere. No, it isn't worth sewing the edges to keep it from fraying. You won't have it around that long. You'll have to replace it fairly often._

At this point someone always poked fun at whichever child was the most likely to trip and fall in the mud -- every class had at least one child with an uncanny magnetism for dirt, it was practically a law of nature -- and the children would laugh, and Iruka wondered what any of them might see in his eyes, if they looked in that moment.

After they'd had their laugh, he would draw a ninja with a leg wrap on the blackboard and tap it with the chalk a few times to draw their attention back up front, and then when the sheepish little faces turned back towards him, he would go on.

_You'll never bother sewing the edges because people will keep throwing things at your legs, and you'll bleed on them. The white makes them an ideal target. A kunai to the front of the thigh at the middle of the wrapping and you can sever muscle; hit the inside of the thigh and you cut a major artery, and they can bleed to death within minutes; hit the back of the thigh and you can sever the hamstring and cripple your enemy for life. The back of the knee is a surer strike at a hamstring, but more difficult to aim at while in motion, and they never stand still to let you figure out where the knee is -- so aim for the white of the thigh-wrap..._

And even teaching at the Academy, he never bothered to hem his leg-wrappings. Because he was teaching children to play lethal mock-games with sharp objects, and there were always accidents -- and his leg-wrappings were usually cleaner than the children's after a day of romping around in the mud, so that when someone fell from a tree and broke an arm, or someone's grip on a kunai slipped and they were crying in shock at the blood, it was pure reflex to unbind the muslin around his thigh, measure it to length, tear it off with a kunai, and be bandaging the child's hurts within a few seconds of the first cry of pain. Talking seemed to reassure them that it would be all right; he turned each of the accidents into lessons in field first-aid, stopped the bleeding -- it was rare for an accident to be serious enough that he couldn't stop the bleeding himself -- and ushered the child off to the nurse's office.

It helped, a little, that he had the freedom to design the timing of his lectures as long as he covered the entire curriculum. So he quietly arranged for his classes not to be studying sharp things when the leaves were falling, and being gathered and burned. He could deal with it any other time of year, but October was just... difficult.

Every October tenth, Iruka came home with two bolts of shroud-white muslin, and spent an hour tearing and folding in silence. Kakashi had learned better than to try to make jokes; over a couple of years, he'd learned to be quiet, to be elsewhere, and to let Iruka struggle to bandage the still-open wounds of his memories one torn strip at a time.

Kakashi always managed to have a pot of hot tea done right when Iruka finished, and they drank it together in silence, as Kakashi waited for Iruka to find his voice again.

Sometimes the first thing he said afterwards was "thank you;" it wasn't for the tea. Because Kakashi knew what it was that he saw in Iruka's eyes, just as Iruka knew what certain dates and the sound of rain on metal did to the expression in Kakashi's usually-cheerful eye. Iruka supposed his parents must have felt the same type of connection when they looked at each other on days like this.

Other times, when Kakashi had come home with bloodied, mud-soaked bandages a few times too often, a little too close together, the first thing Iruka said was a bit more profane, and went on for some time, laced with outrage and worry and frustration and saying everything except the thing he tried hardest not to say, which was _don't do this anymore -- one of these days you won't come home; stop doing this, because you know wherever you go I'll follow you. I can't lose you too. I can't. So stop before I have to follow you into your grave; if you love me, stop doing this..._

Which was the one thing he could never ask, because it wasn't really Kakashi's choice -- not really. There were prices to be paid for being a legend in your own time, and as often as not the prices were paid in blood. Iruka understood that. So he never let himself ask.

But Kakashi, being Kakashi, heard it anyway; and he would gather Iruka into his arms and hold him quietly, until Iruka could hear the equally-silent _I'm still here for you._

And _then_ Kakashi would ruffle his hair and toss a jacket at him and tease him about which of them was making them late this time around and Naruto would have eaten Ichiraku out of ramen by the time they got there for his birthday dinner. He usually managed to rile Iruka into a full-blown howl of outrage somewhere along the road to Ichiraku -- this year it came from speculations about whether Naruto was old enough to appreciate Icha Icha Violence even if Icha Icha Paradise was banned for a couple more years.

Iruka never admitted aloud how much it helped to have a good fit of righteous outrage induced, because if he was scolding Kakashi within an inch of his life, then he was _here,_ and _now,_ and the smell of burning leaves in the autumn air didn't seem quite so unbearable, and then there was always the smell of ramen to help mask it, and Naruto's enthusiastic chatter too. And it helped to have a sunny-haired bundle of energy sitting beside him slurping loudly on noodles and reminding him that a great deal of the joy in his life had also come from this day. It made it easier to smile without any shadows in his eyes when he wished Naruto a happy birthday.

Naruto didn't need to ask the name of the pain of memory that he sometimes saw in Iruka's eyes, either; and Iruka wished he knew how to apologize for that. Because Naruto didn't yet have his own bandages-day -- there was no particular mundane event that reminded him with a stab of agony of a particular someone precious that he'd lost, because the boy had lost everything before he was even old enough to understand loss. And Iruka silently hoped that it would be years before a new loss made him an adult in Konohagakure -- years before those bright sky-blue eyes came to be clouded with the pain that he saw in Kakashi's eyes sometimes, or in the mirror.

Naruto was getting old enough to be a little embarrassed by a sudden bear hug from his teacher, but he was also getting old enough to understand why Iruka sometimes got emotional about things like birthdays and the passage of time. So when Kakashi started loudly protesting about adultery and teacher-student affairs and challenges for slighted honor and such -- with the visible eye _far_ too amused at the opportunity for all-around embarrassment presented, of course -- Naruto just stuck out his tongue at him and kept eating.

Kakashi stood up and started in on some kind of incoherently overdramatic lecture with lines that must have been snagged from years of being harangued by his eternal rival, and apparently he was judging the success of his speech by how far Iruka's head had tucked itself down into the collar of his chuunin vest in pure humiliation.

However, this tactic left Kakashi's bowl of ramen undefended on the bar. Naruto promptly snagged it and started slurping away.

Iruka buried his face in his hands so as not to need to watch the beating-of-heads-against-wooden-structures that was about to commence... and also because it really wouldn't be polite to the Ichiraku staff to be seen _smiling_ at the prospect of massive structural damage to their establishment. But in their own unique ways, both of his 'boys' helped anchor him to the here and the now, more than a decade away from the night his world had fallen apart and he'd been left to pick up the pieces alone.

Now, he felt almost confident that he'd never have to pick up the pieces alone again. And the fear wasn't enough to stop him cold anymore, because there was the warmth of their exuberant living to warm his hands with.

...Of course, right now there were far _too many_ pieces that needed picking up, most of them belonging to the poor ramen-seller. But bowls could be replaced. The sound of Naruto's laughter, even while Kakashi had him in a headlock and was scruffling knuckles through his hair, was a gift beyond any price. Quietly, Iruka bound that sound up along with the memory of muslin tearing in his hands, and then he took a deep breath to start the scolding again. He hoped he wasn't smiling _too_ much, or they'd never take him seriously.


	2. Icha Icha Beach Paradise

**_KakaIru Themes #9 - Walking along the beach_**  
January 2005

* * *

The combination of the last bit I tucked into the Birthday Presents fic (about Kakashi wanting to play another Icha Icha scenario) kind of morphed into the lead-in to a pseudolemon that can't really go anywhere (for reasons that will become apparent in a couple sentences). So that tied into me wanting to remind people about the LJ themes, so I scribbled this down. 

Warnings: Er, none aside from the "make sure you don't have a mouthful of Coke to decorate your computer with" warning?

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a silver-haired sage in training named Hakuto'o, because his hair had been as fair as the moonlight even in his childhood. He lived in a sheltered cove near a lagoon on a little-noticed island off the shore of Fire Country.

_He also wanted it to be known that he wasn't old enough to be a proper sage yet, but given his hair and his perverted tendencies, he'd been judged close enough to pass the entrance exams._

_...Yes, he did tell me that. Now shush._

As he was walking back to his cove with a bucketful of fish he'd caught for dinner, he was caught by the sight of a beautiful maiden struggling on the shore, tangled in discarded fishing nets and crying for help in the plaintive voice of a gull. She was clearly on the edge of exhaustion, frightened, trapped, and alone; and he felt his heart moved by her plight -- as well as feeling other parts moved by her complete lack of clothing beyond the nets. So, from nothing but the purest and most noble of motives, he hurried to see how best he could help her out of the nets--

_ouch. I'm just telling the story, love. Be a little patient..._

In any case, the sage-in-training hurried to the maiden's aid, and was astonished to see that, though maiden she certainly was, human she was not. Her face and body seemed human enough, her skin sun-bronzed like that of the islanders with whom the sage traded; and perhaps she had modeled her human seeming on the island maidens, for her hair was long and dark and unbound after their fashion; and also after their fashion, her breasts were bare and full and ripe as sweet melons.

_yes, dear, I wouldn't be at all surprised if that dress code had a great deal to do with why the sage-in-training settled in that area. May I finish telling the story?_

... But from her waist down, she was more akin to the sea creatures than the islanders; there her skin was pale as the silvered-gray twilight; and in the place of legs, her tail, sturdy and rounded like a dolphin's rather than fish-fragile, thrashed fiercely at the sand.

'A mermaid,' Hakuto'o thought, struck dumb with his wonder and desire. 'I have heard the legends of the distant North, where a little mermaid wished to become mortal; and yet it ended tragically. Perhaps I can save this little mermaid from sharing such a tragic fate...'

and yet, as he drew closer, he saw...

_ouch. I'm only being true to the story, love. It says to draw closer -- see, right there..._

_all right, all right, I suppose this is close enough..._

...he saw that she was not such a little mermaid, after all; for certainly her figure was that of a grown woman...

_aww. You have to go to bed RIGHT now? Yes, I know you have classes to teach tomorrow. But can't I finish telling the bedtime story first?_

_Well, all right. I can certainly think of enough interesting things to do with you and me and a bed..._

_...ouch._


	3. Consequenses

_**Consequenses**  
April 2005 _

Written for the Jutsus Gone Wrong challenge at LJ's Naruto100 community. Warning: Serious, traumatizing crack ensues. You have been warned.

* * *

**Title: **Consequences 

**Challenge: **Jutsus gone wrong

**Rating:** PG-13

**Bonuses/Warnings:** You just had to mention gender swapping, didn't you? I think I'm likely hit several of the others in the process though... you may want to be prepared with some brain bleach, because the plotbunny that just latched itself onto my ankle is on some serious psychotropic drugs...

Set approximately a year after the end of Side Effects (which I really have to finish chapter 23 of one of these days(TM)...) In other words, involves Kakashi and Iruka and shounen ai, so don't read if you don't like that sort of thing.

* * *

Iruka had known from the moment that Naruto showed up on their doorstep that when he and Kakashi returned to Konoha, there were going to be Consequences. With a capital C. And likely several other capitals, and many exclamation points in the process. He'd been terrified that the Consequences would cost him his job at the academy; the villagers of Konoha weren't precisely the most open-minded people, as evidenced by their treatment of a certain boy who'd spent his entire life being shunned for a birth-curse that was in no way his own fault... and for almost two full months, it really had been touch and go. 

But in the end Kakashi had pointed out far too sweetly that if his family was so unwelcome in Konohagakure, he was happy to take his family to another village such as Sunagakure; and when the council threatened him with missing-nin status, Tsunade had produced a signed and sealed and notarized scroll authorizing the transfer of Kakashi "and his entire family" due to "intolerable prejudice on the part of Konohagakure's Council and citizens," and she'd handed it to him with far too broad a grin and then turned to the council and asked, "Now, what were you saying about missing-nins?"

So in order to get that scroll back from him, they'd agreed to let Iruka resume his teaching position at the academy.

In the year since then, Iruka had come to understand Naruto's position firsthand. As an orphan himself, he'd understood Naruto's loneliness; but only after their return did he come to understand what it was like to be shunned, whispered about behind his back, and/or mocked to his face by the ordinary citizens of Konoha.

Kakashi bristled at them. (And anyone with Kakashi's hair had a built-in advantage when it came to bristling.) But it didn't help during the times when Kakashi wasn't there.

Naruto also bristled at them. (Anyone with Naruto's hair had nearly as much built-in bristling advantage as Kakashi did.) But since Naruto was already an outcast, it didn't really help either. Iruka always hugged the boy for it, though.

Even Sasuke had been known to glare at people who spent too much time whispering about Iruka within earshot of the Uchiha heir. (Surprisingly enough, Sasuke didn't take as much advantage as he could have of his hairstyle-granted bristling-advantages, preferring glares and scowls and monosyllables, possibly to make sure to contrast himself in as many ways as possible with his bristly blonde archrival.)

Iruka would have hugged him too, except that Sasuke would have had to spend the next three hours stalking around glaring and muttering and finding some way to be more-angsty-than-thou again, particularly if Neji had witnessed anything as sappy as a hug; and so Iruka decided it was kinder not to torture the brooding teenager, really. But he appreciated the sentiment.

And so Iruka had decided to live his life in the pattern that it had settled into -- teaching his students, smiling despite the mutters and slurs, and accepting that his public choice had irrevocably altered the way strangers thought of him. It helped that many of the chuunin and jounin were more accepting than the ordinary villagers were.

But, in the end, what finally got the villagers to stop muttering so much about Iruka was something completely outside of Iruka's control.

It manifested itself, inevitably, in the form of green spandex. Because Maito Gai had always proclaimed himself as Kakashi's archrival, of course. And Kakashi's gaining a family meant that Gai was now one down in their scoring contest, which Gai currently reckoned at somewhere around 115 to 116. So Gai had decided that he needed to even the score.

Eight months later, Gai was still walking into Iruka's classroom almost every day after school to ask advice. It was an improvement over the first half-year, when Gai had been showing up at least three times a day, but still... Iruka sighed to himself, and fixed his most polite smile on his face, and asked, "Yes, Gai-sensei?"

"My fair blushing Iruka-kun!" the green-clad jounin declaimed, since (s)he was still incapable of simply 'saying' something when it could be declaimed or announced or pontificated instead. "I have a question of great import! Since it is apparent to all that you have regained your strength and your muscle tone admirably, and I understand that it is unwise to push one's body too far in such a youthfully resplendent condition, tell me: how soon can I resume my usual training schedule? Because I confess that I find myself distressed at the shape I've become, and although I understand the necessity of supporting the very beginnings of youth's springtime--"

It wasn't fair to stare. It really wasn't. Iruka fixed his gaze firmly on the bridge of Gai's nose and tried to stammer out something more or less coherent about two or three months after birth.

Gai thanked him grandiosely, and at some length, before (s)he waddled back out of the classroom with a hand propped to the small of the back and with the mound of eight months worth of blooming youth curving the front of the green spandex. (The green spandex had thus been demonstrated to adapt itself to anything. Inspired yet again by his mentor's example, Lee had been trying to start up a home business selling green spandex body suits to pregnant women. Mercifully, Lee hadn't succeeded yet.)

Iruka sat back down in his chair very carefully, shaking all over, face propped in his hands.

There was a rustle at the window, and a familiar shaggy silver head peeked through. "Is it gone yet?" Kakashi asked in an undertone.

"Gai-sensei just left."

"Thank God." Kakashi swung himself in through the window and sat down with a sigh next to Iruka. "I don't know whether to nominate you for sainthood for dealing with him-I-mean-her, or to flay us both and wear sackcloth in penitence for having helped inspire that. I mean, I could try to claim it's your fault, except that you just provided the example; it was Naruto's sexy-no-jutsu that started all this, but Gai's fixated on me and that stupid rivalry, so there's more than enough blame to share around, and it takes a lot of blaming to account for that... and if I ever figure out who must have gotten drunk enough to father that child--"

"Let's not think about it," Iruka begged, gathering up his books and papers and putting them in his backpack in order to follow Kakashi out through the window. Since Gai had begun to gain weight in such an unbalancing direction, taking to the roofs was much safer than taking to the streets. Most of the town's ninja had taken to the powerlines in order to avoid a too-close encounter.

The ninja near-evacuation had left the ordinary citizens of Konoha with nowhere to escape a proudly blossoming Gai-sensei and his proclamations of the embodiment of flowering youth. Given the loud green evidence on a daily basis... well, there was only so much scandalized gossip-space available in people's minds, and Gai seemed determined to corner the market. (Maybe he thought it would boost the score to 117-116 from what would otherwise have been a tie.)

So although he felt furtively guilty about abandoning the admittedly brave and in fact far _too_ courageous soul who had followed Iruka's example and thereby saved Iruka from the brunt of the village's gossip, the academy teacher still followed Kakashi through the window. Because Gai was almost too unique to bear in ordinary circumstances, and now he was... extraordinarily unique. Undeniably, unmistakably, and terrifyingly... unique.

"Race you home," Kakashi said, grinning.

"Hmm?"

"Naruto's been speculating about how old a kid has to be in order to learn how to draw graffiti. Apparently he's taking his big-brotherly educational duties a little too much to heart."

Iruka's ordinarily tanned skin took another step towards green. "No. No, no, no, no... once was enough, I'm not raising another incorrigible prankster!"

Kakashi blinked after the cloud of dust raised by Iruka dashing off at top speed. Motherhood was certainly inspirational when it came to perfecting some ninja techniques, notably the ones involving moving at high speed. Even some of the villagers were picking up on it, when the alternative was being faced with Gai. So maybe it wasn't such a bad consequence after all...

...no, scratch that. Penitence was still owed somewhere, Kakashi was sure of that much.

* * *

_And the sanity-saving alternate ending..._

_

* * *

_Iruka woke with a scream, clutching at the blankets, shaking all over.

Beside him, Kakashi rolled over sleepily. "Bad dream?"

_"Bad dream?"_ Iruka managed, all but whimpering. "It was... it was... there was... spandex, and Gai, and Lee was selling _more_ spandex, and... and... it was a _nightmare!"_

"There, there. Roll over and go back to sleep," Kakashi said.

"But you don't _understand,"_ Iruka whispered, trembling. "It was... there was... _GAI-SENSEI...!"_

"Go back to sleep," Kakashi said again. "I'm only two and a half hours late."

Shivering all over, Iruka hid himself under the blankets and hoped if he just wished hard enough, he could get the image out of his brain again. And he was going to be praying until the next time he did run into Gai-sensei, just in case.


	4. Get With the Times

**_ Get With the Times (Video games)  
_**April 2005

Written for the Video Games challenge at LJ's Naruto100 community.

**

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Title:** Get With the Times  
**Characters:** Team 7, Iruka, and some special guest appearances  
**Challenge:** Video Games  
**Word Count:** 400  
**Bonuses:** Cross-dressing, multiple-of-100-word count, Naruto characters transformed into animals, game over  
**Note:** Written as an alternative to having to deal with what FF dot net's forcing me to choose between (bastardized karaoke scene or abandoning the site entirely)... sigh.  
**Other note:** Beware of crack. And yes, this game DOES exist, though not specifically for PS2 and I've never seen anyone play it, so I don't know the, er, action details... just seen screen shots, and (sweatdrop) that was enough...

* * *

The day that Kakashi-sensei decided to modernize his teaching methods went down in the history books as one of the most eventful in recent Konoha history... and that was _including_ events like the chuunin exams. 

Iruka stared at the screen, left eyebrow twitching spastically, with a very unhealthy-looking vein throbbing in his forehead.

"Computer-based educational methods are more and more important these days," Kakashi said sagely, perched cross-legged on a beanbag that had seen better days, and poking buttons on the controller in his hand. "This one, for example, has several benefits -- hand-eye coordination, elementary social skills, high-speed judgement calls--"

_"JUDGEMENT CALLS?"_ Iruka thought he was sounding quite reasonable and self-controlled, given the circumstances. "WHAT about this game involves _GOOD_ judgement? Where the hell did you get this -- travesty, this --WAIT -- wait, that -- _WHAT is Sasuke WEARING?"_

"A French maid outfit," Sakura said with a disturbing note of bliss in her voice, mashing buttons until the Sasuke on the screen did a high kick that flashed frilly underwear.

Behind her, Sasuke huffed and crossed his arms and turned a ferocious and suspiciously pink-cheeked glare on the corner of Naruto's sofa. Naruto, being Naruto, laughed at him.

"You're just sore because I whipped your sorry butt and got to be seme!"

Sasuke's pride couldn't let that go uncommented. "I transformed you into a goat!"

"Yeah, well, you were the one in the skirt, and goats are all horny and stuff, so of course I won that round--"

Iruka looked like he'd just blown a blood vessel. "He transformed into a _goat?_ With French maids and miniskirts and God there's panty shots and -- wait, there's _worse_ than panty shots, he -- just took off his -- Wait, what am _I_ wearing?"

"Nothing at all!" Kakashi said gleefully.

Iruka's scream of outrage shattered windows for three blocks.

* * *

By the time Tsunade finished picking the fractured shards of the game disc out of Jiraiya's backside (since Iruka had imbedded them quite deeply), three notes had been added to the development file kept by the company who had been working on beta-testing the Icha Icha Paradise PS2 game. 

The notes read:  
_  
1) Investigate secondary market use of broken game disks as shuriken._

_2) Run background (and sanity) checks on teachers who offer to beta test H-games._

_3) Umino Iruka-sensei (plus) students (plus) hentai material (equals) game over._


	5. Roll Over Walt Disney

**_Roll over Walt Disney...  
_**August 2005

Written for the Fairy Tales challenge for Naruto100.

* * *

Challenge: Fairy tales  
Length: Turned out about 1200 words. (So I'm genetically drabble-impaired. Comes from too many years of being paid by published inch of text...)  
Rating: Crackitty crack crack. Oh, and probably PG 13, but beware of brain damage.

* * *

Once upon a time, in a small village dripping with ninjas, there was a child born with hair black as coal, skin white as snow, and eyes red as blood. (Unfortunately, this was nothing new, since there was an entire clan of them.) 

Under normal circumstances, the new baby would have been named Snow White, or at least Yuki, but his father protested that there had never been a self-respecting ninja named Snow White, so he decreed that the baby should be called Sasuke instead. Nice traditional ninja name and all that. (The father still blamed the elder son's deviance and abnormal nail-polish fetish on being named after small woodland vermin, and was determined not to let the same mistake happen twice.)

A few years later, when Itachi had massacred his parents and taken his rightful place as evil overlord of all he surveyed, he had the manufacturers of Sandaime's crystal ball come up with a custom job just for him. It was a tall silver mirror (with gills as a fashion statement).

Every day, once Itachi had finished his morning rituals of eating breakfast, painting his nails, and kicking any available puppies, he would put on his swirly cloak and stand in front of the mirror and say "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most psychotic of them all?"

Most of the time it was a bit of a toss-up between himself and the snake-pervert a couple fairytales over, but the mirror knew when to lie through its sharp little teeth.

So after placating Itachi's sense of evil overlord-dom, the mirror usually proceeded with the daily stock report, weather forecast, fashion trends among the gothically depressed, and other news items of general interest to psychotic bishounen who wore nail polish. (Hey. Sandaime's crystal ball is a goooood piece of work. The company always throws in a little extra service for their patrons.)

Most of the time, Itachi's little brother never made it into the "fashion trends among the gothically depressed" list, because let's face it, the boy was almost as severely fashion-impaired as he was emotionally-impaired. All right, full-body tattoos were fairly gothic, but they kept migrating. Indecision in body decoration is a major fashion no-no. And one-piece black rubber wetsuits that don't even fit properly? Just don't look good on anybody.

One day, though, Itachi's little brother actually made national fashion headlines. Granted, it was the "Top Ten Worst Fashion Ideas of All Time" list, but apparently Sasuke subscribed to the theory that any press coverage is good press coverage. Between the peroxide, the purple lipstick (everyone knew purple was best reserved for nail polish), the facial tattoos, the full-eye contact lenses, and the couldn't-make-up-their-minds hand-wing things attached to the back of the outfit, Itachi simply stood and stared for a good ten minutes.

No, this would NOT do.

Not at all.

If word ever got out that the country's most elegantly-dressed goth evil overlord bishounen's little brother had outdone even Oscar stars in a quest for the ultimate sheer eye-gouging couture nightmare... he'd never be able to hold his head up in a gathering of his peers again.

So Itachi calmly had the boy sealed up in a barrel and shipped off to the snake-pervert a couple of fairy tales over. Let _him_ deal with the fashion nightmare. Maybe Sasuke would be considered his apprentice rather than Itachi's brother, so that the fashion-nightmare cooties would rub off in that direction instead.

Unfortunately for Itachi, several of the little woodland creatures took issue with his plans, and set off to rescue Sasuke. The caterpillar-eyebrowed green thing was more a laughable nuisance than anything else, but the little fox was living up to his trickster name far too well. They got Sasuke out of the barrel and even dragged him back to the village for a while.

In utter exasperation, Itachi took matters into his own hands. He stormed in, mocked the boy's weakness for a while, broke some disposable parts including his mind, and gave him a good helpful nudge towards the snake-pervert's fairy tale, then left dusting his hands off and muttering about good riddance.

The exasperating little fox just couldn't tell when to leave well enough alone, though. He actually tried to get that walking couture nightmare back. Voluntarily. When any rational creature would have been blinded by the experience. On the other hand, the fox thought that eye-blinding orange was a _good_ fashion statement.

The two of them deserved each other, Itachi thought in disgust.

So he decided it was time to catch himself a fox pelt for his floor just so that his promisingly psychotic younger brother could finally go learn something approaching fashion sense from the normally very-well-dressed snake-pervert.

The duel with the little fox didn't go as well as he'd hoped. In addition to being so agonizingly ORANGE that he scarred Itachi's retinas even secondhand, there was something just as blindingly PINK this time. Flipping on a pair of shades just to deal with the visual assault, Itachi threw his hands in the air.

"Take him," he said with a sigh. "I quit. I'm going to go get drunk with Sakurazukamori over there in the universe that keeps shedding feathers all over everything. At least they have some sense of _style."_

"Uh," the fox said. "Have you _seen_ some of the outfits the girl puts on her poor brother?"

"Shut up!" the pink thing said, and turned a sickly grin on Itachi, who was looking suspicious. "Never mind him!" she said brightly. "Look what he considers normal clothing."

"Hey!"

"You have a point," Itachi granted, a palm to his forehead to try to further blot out the retinal trauma, because the shades weren't enough by themselves.

"Right!" the pink thing said encouragingly. "Go get drunk with whoosit over there. We'll keep your mirror polished and everything while you're gone."

_"Excuse_ me," said Sasuke. "He's the evil overlord. He killed my family. I'm going to kill him now."

"In your dreams," the pink thing said. "Go on," she told Itachi. "Bring back a bunch of feathers. We'll make you a nice down pillow."

"...If I didn't know better I'd say you were trying to get rid of me."

"Well, duh," the fox said, keeping Sasuke in a squirming and thrashing headlock to keep him from interrupting the conversation again. "You're an embarrassment to society. You walk around with a LAMPSHADE on your head. And NAIL POLISH. Talk about tacky..."

Itachi opened and closed his mouth several times, and then decided there was no hope for the entire civilization and stalked off toward the road signs that pointed toward the CLAMPverse, where people _understood_ how to revere and drool over brooding dark bishounen with angst-ridden pasts and hair and cloaks that fluttered in the wind. And there wasn't a thing wrong with his nail polish, dammit.

And so (once the pink thing and the fox had sicced the Queer Eye team from the third fairy tale to the left on Sasuke, leaving him without any clip-on wings or peroxide in a closet newly filled with burgundy silk shirts on wooden hangers and charcoal-gray linen suits), FINALLY they all lived happily ever after.


End file.
